Your dexterity determines your casting speed, and NEVER increases through your whole career. Being able to zip off a quick heal is a very important part of your role in the game. You are a secondary healer after all!Empathy determines your power pool, and how many heals you can cast in a single power bar. The more the merrier!Quickness determines how fast you swing your weapon, and as an interrupter/aggro management expert, it's not how hard you hit thats important, its how fast you can do it.
My final spec turned out to be: 49 Nurture, 35 Regrowth, 25 Blades, and like 7 Parry. As such, I am a healing warden with blades as secondary. I have yet to meet a warden who doesn't spec at least to the high 40's in Nurture. This is because you get your unique ability "6-second Pulsing Blade-Turn" at level 45.

If you are wanting to hit hard at all, don't be a Warden. Even if you spec 50 in blades you will never hit even close to as hard as a Hero. You are on the same damage table as a Nightshade/Ranger, but they get special abilities like poison or the bow to help them out. Wardens get nothing. We hit like a wet noodle. Most of the time if you are hitting a tank, he will drag you around, not even noticing that you are hitting him.
Where our specialty lies is that we can pretend to be a tank and /assist with the tanks, but at a split seconds notice, pull off and shoot a heal over to the tanks that need it. Or rez the Bard or Druid that died. Our strength lies in our diversity. Not to mention we can negate one hit every 6 seconds for our whole group. :)
All in all playing a Warden is much fun, we excel in PVE, and hold our own in a grp in RVR, and can usually handle the lone stealther trying to sneak up and gank you. While we don't hit hard it takes a REALLY long time to kill one of us as we wear scale, and have a ton of HP.

BTW I'm playing the current version (as of August 2004), in the USA, which is 1.70 (thanks for the suggestion TMPman.)